Ruth Asawa

Nothing Is So Humble: Prints from Everyday Objects
2020-11-20 08:00 - 2021-04-30 17:00 UTC | Whitney Museum of American Art, 99 Gansevoort Street, New York, NY, 10014, United States
This focused exhibition, drawn from the Whitney’s collection, will look at the creative and irreverent ways that seven artists—Ruth Asawa, Sari Dienes, Pati Hill, Kahlil Robert Irving, Virginia Overton, Julia Phillips, and Zarina—have employed the everyday objects around them to make prints. Nothing Is So Humble takes its title from an evocative proposition by Dienes that recognized aesthetic possibilities in the most mundane of subjects: “Bones, lint, Styrofoam, banana skins, the squishes and squashes found on the street: nothing is so humble that it cannot be made into art.”
The artists in this exhibition share an unconventional approach to printmaking. Rather than mark a metal plate or carve into a block of wood, they have worked directly with the stuff of their environments: making a rubbing from a maintenance hole cover, photocopying a hairbrush, running nylon stockings through an etching press, or even pressing a slice of prosciutto onto a printing plate.
The resulting surface impressions—at once precise and abstracted—capture intimate views of their commonplace subjects that teeter between recognizable and elusive. By making visible what might otherwise be overlooked, these works transform ordinary encounters into poetic and poignant accounts of our world.
This exhibition is organized by Kim Conaty, Steven and Ann Ames Curator of Drawings and Prints.
The Museum is $25 adults
$18 Senior, Student, Disability
Pay What You Wish on Fridays, 6–9 pm.
All visitors and members must book timed tickets in advance. Please note that the Whitney is operating at a significantly reduced capacity for your safety, and same-day tickets may be extremely limited.

Women, Surrealism, and Abstraction
2020-08-25 09:00 - 2021-12-12 17:00 | Nora Eccles Harrison Museum Of Art, 650 North 1100 East, Logan, UT, 84322, United States
Drawn exclusively from the Museum collection, Women, Surrealism, and Abstraction endeavors to look beyond typical art historical boundaries and to begin to lay claim to a more holistic and complex view of art history—one that includes parties left out because of aesthetic biases based on a system of privileged white male patrimony.
During the 20th century, art made by women was often overlooked or dismissed by museums, collectors, and art historians. An ironic side effect of this absence of attention was that it lessened the constraints and dictates of the marketplace for women, allowing for increased experimentation and the pursuit of a personal vision in ways often less available for their male counterparts.
Until more recently, women of color—especially Native American women—have rarely been included in art historical studies focusing on Surrealism and abstraction. In addition, artists who work in ceramics, fiber arts, photography, and printmaking, rather than painting and sculpture, are often left out of these studies as well. However, Surrealism and abstraction offered women a glimpse of a world in which creative activity and liberation from societal expectations co-existed, allowing them to embark on the difficult path to artistic freedom. Visit the website for virtual and audio tours.
We are now limiting Museum attendance to 25 visitors at a time and require reservations. Photo: Margaret Tomkins Untitled
Wednesday 12pm – 5pm
Thursday 12pm – 5pm
Friday 12pm – 7pm
Saturday 10am – 3pm
Sunday – Tuesday CLOSED

50x50 San Jose Museum of Art Publishes Online Catalog
2020-08-18 - 2022-05-02 | Online
SJMA has published an online catalog titled 50X50: Stories of Visionary Artists from the Collection that features 50 artists. Learn about their lives, what inspired them, and what materials they used. Each artist chapter has been carefully researched and diligently cited. Featuring the artists’ own words via video and audio files. Large-scale artworks are available for your enjoyment.
View now >

Question Everything! The Women of Black Mountain College
2020-01-24 11:00 - 2020-04-25 17:00 | Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, 120 College Street, Ashville, NC, 28801, United States
This exhibition will celebrate the work and impact of the women associated with Black Mountain College, featuring borrowed works alongside pieces from the BMCM+AC collection by a wide-ranging group of artists including Anni Albers, Suzi Gablik, Ruth Asawa, Jo Sandman, M.C. Richards, and Hazel Larsen Archer.
BMC was a place where women could explore their identities as artists and individuals; a space where women were expected to question things, to think critically and to explore their own self determinacy. Through artworks, personal accounts and archival film and photographs, Question Everything! details how this new generation went forward with a strong sense of what it meant to be a woman in the 20th century, forging new paths for themselves and those who followed in their footsteps.
The museum is open Mon – Sat.
Admission is free with suggested donation.
This exhibition is supported by The Beattie Foundation, John Byrd + Ellen Clarke, Marion L. Johnson Church, Mr. + Mrs. Raymond J. Horowitz Foundation, Thomas Frank, and the Windgate Charitable Foundation.
Special thanks to: The Britton family, Connie Bostic, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Sarah Downing, Johanna Engebrecht, Katherine French, Suzi Gablik, Lorrie Goulet, Rob Hazelgrove + Dan McLawhorn, Hudson + Terry Lanier, Rebecca Lowell, Michael Manes, The Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation, Donna Marie Perkins, Reynolda House Museum of American Art, Jo Sandman, Susan Rhew Design, Heather South, Western Regional Archives, and Erika Zarow.
Preview the Exhibition >
Learn more about life at Black Mountain College, and Asawa’s time there >
View more of the work she created at Black Mountain >
Top photo: Untitled S.529 (Wall-Mounted Paperfold with Horizontal Stripes), ca. 1970s
Ruth Asawa, Ink and paper

A Line Can Go Anywhere
2020-01-10 10:00 - 2020-02-22 17:00 | David Zwirner London, 24 Grafton Street, London, W1S 4EZ, United Kingdom
David Zwirner is pleased to announce an exhibition of work by American artist Ruth Asawa (1926–2013) at the gallery’s London location. This will be the first major presentation of the artist’s work outside of the United States and will include a number of her key forms, focusing in particular on the relationship between her wire sculptures and wide-ranging body of works on paper.
An influential artist, devoted activist, and tireless advocate for arts education, Asawa is best known for her extensive body of hanging wire sculptures. These intricate, dynamic, and sinuous works, begun in the late 1940s, continue to challenge conventional notions of sculpture through their emphasis on lightness and transparency. Relentlessly experimental across a range of mediums, Asawa also produced numerous drawings and prints that, like her wire sculptures, are built on simple, repeated gestures that accumulate into complex compositions. Although she moved between abstract and figurative registers in her sculptures and drawings, respectively, viewed together, the works in this exhibition nevertheless incite a rich dialogue and find commonality in their sustained emphasis on the natural world and its forms, as well as in their deft use of the basic aesthetic concept of the line.
“I was interested in it because of the economy of a line, making something in space, enclosing it without blocking it out. It’s still transparent. I realized that if I was going to make these forms, which interlock and interweave, it can only be done with a line because a line can go anywhere.”
Image: Ruth Asawa, Sculptor, at Her Door, 1963 (detail). Photo by Imogen Cunningham. © 2020 Imogen Cunningham Trust

Making Knowing: Craft in Art, 1950–2019
2019-11-22 10:30 - 2022-02-01 18:00 | Whitney Museum of American Art, 99 Gansevoort Street, New York, NY, 10014, United States
Making Knowing: Craft in Art, 1950–2019 foregrounds how visual artists have explored the materials, methods, and strategies of craft over the past seven decades. Some expand techniques with long histories, such as weaving, sewing, or pottery, while others experiment with textiles, thread, clay, beads, and glass, among other mediums. The traces of the artists’ hands-on engagement with their materials invite viewers to imagine how it might feel to make each work.
While artists’ reasons for taking up craft range widely, many aim to subvert prevalent standards of so-called “fine art,” often in direct response to the politics of their time.
In challenging accepted ideas of taste—whether by embracing the decorative or turning away from traditional painting and sculpture in favor of functional items like bowls or blankets—these artists reclaim visual languages that have typically been coded as feminine, domestic, or vernacular. By highlighting marginalized modes of artistic production, these artists challenge the power structures that determine artistic value.
This exhibition provides new perspectives on subjects that have been central to artists, including abstraction, popular culture, feminist and queer aesthetics, and recent explorations of identity and relationships to place. Together, the works demonstrate that craft-informed techniques of making carry their own kind of knowledge, one that is crucial to a more complete understanding of the history and potential of art.
Drawn primarily from the Whitney’s collection, the exhibition will include over eighty works by more than sixty artists, including Ruth Asawa, Eva Hesse, Mike Kelley, Liza Lou, Ree Morton, Howardena Pindell, Robert Rauschenberg, Elaine Reichek, and Lenore Tawney, as well as featuring new acquisitions by Shan Goshorn, Kahlil Robert Irving, Simone Leigh, Jordan Nassar, and Erin Jane Nelson.
Making Knowing: Craft in Art, 1950–2019 is curated by Jennie Goldstein, assistant curator, and Elisabeth Sherman, assistant curator, with Ambika Trasi, curatorial assistant.
Support for Making Knowing: Craft in Art, 1950–2019 is provided by the Lenore G. Tawney Foundation.
Photo: Liza Lou, Kitchen, 1991-96. Beads, plaster, wood and found objects, 96 × 132 × 168 in. (243.8 × 335.3 × 426.7 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift of Peter Norton 2008.339a-x. © Liza Lou. Photograph by Tom Powel, courtesy the artist
All museum visitors must book timed tickets in advance.
https://whitney.org/visit
$25
Adults
$18
Seniors, Students, and Visitors with Disabilities
Free
18 and under
The museum is closed on Tuesdays, and is open 10:30 to 6:00 every day except Friday, when it’s open until 10pm

The Pencil Is a Key
2019-10-11 12:00 - 2020-01-05 18:00 | The Drawing Center, 35 Wooster Street, New York, NY, 10013, United States
Drawings by Incarcerated Artists
The Pencil Is a Key is an exhibition of historical and contemporary drawings by incarcerated people from all over the globe. Works by artists who were or currently are prisoners will be juxtaposed with drawings by prisoners who became artists while incarcerated. Examples include drawings by political prisoners like Gustave Courbet, who was held in Saint Pélagie Prison for his role in the Paris Commune uprising of 1871; artists incarcerated during World War II as noncombatents like Hans Bellmer, who was interned in France, and a young Ruth Asawa, who was interned by the US government because she was a Japanese American; as well as artists in Soviet Gulags, Apartheid-era South Africa, in Central and South American countries under military dictatorships, and in the post-Arab Spring Middle East. The exhibition will also present drawings by members of contemporary American prison populations who found their talent through prison art programs, as well as collections of works by anonymous contemporary artist incarcerates working in drawing genres specific to prison life, like “Paños Chicanos” drawn on handkerchiefs, or envelope drawings meant to be sold or delivered through the mail.
Drawing is vital to those in captivity; it is a vehicle through which they proclaim their individuality, express their hope, and imagine their freedom. The drawings featured in this exhibition present powerful evidence of the persistence of human creativity in the most inhumane of circumstances and argue for the necessity of art—in the form of drawing—to the life of every human being. Created in extreme circumstances, the drawings in this show are weapons in the fight for justice, records that bear witness to terrible circumstances, containers of memory, and portals to a better future. Their very existence is of great significance, but their genius offers the proof of drawing’s purpose as well as the clearest explanation of why institutions like The Drawing Center must continue to present art to the public.
Image: Azza Abo Rebieh (1980–), Nayfeh, 2016. Pencil on paper. Courtesy of the artist.
The Drawing Center is closed on Monday & Tuesday
Admission for students and seniors is $3
Admission is free Thursdays, 6–8pm,
and at all times for the following:
Children under 12
Members
Visitors with disabilities and
a person accompanying them.

Women Take the Floor
2019-09-13 08:00 - 2021-05-03 17:00 | Museum of Fine Arts Boston, 465 Huntington Avenue, Boston, 02115
“Women Take the Floor” challenges the dominant history of American art by focusing on the overlooked and underrepresented work and stories of women artists. This reinstallation—or “takeover”—of Level 3 of the Art of the Americas Wing advocates for diversity, inclusion, and gender equity in museums, the art world, and beyond. With more than 250 works drawn primarily from the MFA’s collection, the exhibition is organized into seven thematic galleries.
Presented in the Saundra B. and William H. Lane Galleries, Beyond the Loom: Fiber as Sculpture highlights pioneering artists who radically redefined textiles as modern art in the 1960s and 1970s: Anni Albers, Olga de Amaral, Ruth Asawa, Sheila Hicks, Kay Sekimachi and Lenore Tawney. The second rotation, opening in spring 2020, focuses on contemporary artists using the medium of textiles (embroidery, weaving, printed fabric, and quilts) to challenge notions of identity, gender, and politics.

In a Cloud, in a Wall, in a Chair: Six Modernists in Mexico at Midcentury
2019-08-16 08:00 - 2020-01-12 17:00 | Art Institute of Chicago, 111 South Michigan Avenue, Chicago, IL 60603, 60603, United States
The work of Clara Porset, Lola Álvarez Bravo, Anni Albers, Ruth Asawa, Cynthia Sargent, and Sheila Hicks has never been shown together before. While some of these artists and designers knew one another and collaborated together, they are from different generations, and their individual work encompasses a range of media varying from furniture and interior design to sculpture, textiles, photography, and prints. They all, however, share one defining aspect: Mexico, a country in which they all lived or worked between the 1940s and 1970s. During this period they all realized projects that breached disciplinary boundaries and national divides.

“There is design in everything … in a cloud, in a wall, in a chair, in the sea, in the sand, in a pot.” —Clara Porset, 1952
This exhibition is the first to explore Mexico’s impact on these visionary artists and designers. It takes its title from a quote by Clara Porset, a political exile from Cuba who became one of Mexico’s most prominent modern furniture designers. Influenced by Bauhaus ideas, she believed that design could reshape cities, elevate the quality of life, and solve large-scale social problems. This approach informed her 1952 exhibition Art in Daily Life, in whose catalogue she wrote, “There is design in everything … in a cloud, in a wall, in a chair, in the sea, in the sand, in a pot,” encouraging us to look at both the natural and machine world for inspiration and ideas.
Arriving in Mexico City in 1935, Porset started her design studio in the early 1940s. Inspired by the country’s climate, lifestyles, aesthetic and cultural traditions, and political progressivism following the end of the Mexican Revolution (roughly 1920), she conceived designs to be made from local materials and used both handmade and industrial manufacturing techniques.
Mexican artist Lola Álvarez Bravo, a close friend and collaborator of Porset, was one of few women photographers working in the country during this period. Her photographs are essential to understanding Porset’s no longer extant projects, and her dynamic photomontages, created by cutting and pasting together parts of different photographs to create new images, provide insights into Mexico’s richly layered social, political, and geographical landscape during the 1940s and 1950s.
Porset was also friends with German émigré Anni Albers. Encouraged to visit Mexico by Porset, she first traveled to the country in 1935 and made 13 subsequent trips. Mexico’s landscape and architecture became a vital source of inspiration and remained so throughout her career, providing an abstract visual language for her designs. The triangle motif, for instance, that she used repeatedly in textiles and screenprints was drawn from archaeological Zapotec sites such as Monte Albán.
Mexico also left a deep impression on Japanese American Ruth Asawa. In 1947, two years after taking a class with Porset at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, she returned to the country and was drawn to the artistry in utilitarian looped-wire baskets that she encountered in Toluca. From then on, sculptures made with this wire technique became her primary practice.
Learn more >

Specters of Disruption
2019-08-15 09:30 - 2019-11-10 17:15 | deYoung Museum, Golden Gate Park 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive, San Francisco, CA, United States
Specters of Disruption is the result of an inquiry into the shared encyclopedic collections of the de Young and Legion of Honor museums, performed with an eye toward patterns that might suggest a storyline within a collective institutional subconscious. The narratives of disruption that emerged from this process speak to the museums’ deep grounding in their origins and geographies. Drawing from their historic holdings and re-contextualizing them with modern and contemporary art, Specters of Disruption connects the museums’ colonial and geological underpinnings to the current conditions of the Bay Area and the evolving trajectories of American art histories. Unfolding through several galleries, this presentation is conceived in five chapters that revolve around different manifestations of disruption within nature, history and myth, culture and technology.
The Museum is open Tuesday–Sunday, 9:30 am–5:15 pm.
This exhibition is included with general admission.
Image: Carrie Mae Weems, “Lincoln, Lonnie, and Me – A Story in 5 Parts” (detail), 2012. Video installation and mixed media © Carrie Mae Weems. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

Masters of Modern Design Screening and Panel Discussion
2019-08-10 13:00 - 17:00 | deYoung Museum, Golden Gate Park 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive, San Francisco, CA, United States
Join us in the Koret Auditorium for a special screening of Masters of Modern Design: The Art of the Japanese American Experience and a panel conversation with Ruth Asawa’s children, Aiko Cuneo, Addie Lanier, and Paul Lanier, Ruth Asawa’s biographer, Marilyn Chase, Masters of Modern Design’s director Akira Boch, KCET/PBS SoCal/LinkTV Chief Creative Officer and Executive Producer Juan Devis, and Producer Jacqueline Reyno.
Free Saturdays are about celebrating art and this city that we love. Explore the permanent collections, take a guided tour, and get inspired to create art of your own at our art making station.
The day will include engaging art experiences for the entire family. Enjoy access to the de Youngsters studio, family art making, gallery guides, enhanced gallery tours with discussion groups, sketching in the permanent collection galleries, and more.
MASTERS OF MODERN DESIGN: The Art of the Japanese American Experience
From the hand-drawn logo of The Godfather to Herman Miller’s biomorphic coffee table, the work of Japanese American designers including Ruth Asawa, George Nakashima, Isamu Noguchi, S. Neil Fujita, and Gyo Obata permeated postwar culture. While these second generation Japanese American artists have been celebrated, less-discussed is how their World War II incarceration—a period of intense hardship and discrimination—had a powerful effect on their lives and art.
This documentary, a co-production between Japanese American National Museum’s Watase Media Arts Center and KCET for the series ARTBOUND, explores the ways in which their camp experiences impacted their lives, influenced their art, and sent them on trajectories that eventually led to their changing the face of American culture with their immense talents.
Aiko Cuneo attended Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY. She had the pleasure of working on several projects with her mother and as a teaching artist in San Francisco schools. Currently, Cuneo supports Asawa’s body of work by conserving wire sculptures, maintaining a catalogue, assisting curators and writers, and educating a broader audience.
Addie Lanier is the younger daughter of Ruth Asawa. She studied English Literature at UCLA, taught in San Francisco’s public schools for nine years, and later worked for the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation in grants management. Over the years she has supported her mother’s career as a grant writer, copyeditor, and assistant on public commissions. Since the early 2000s, she has assisted curators by providing information to support exhibitions and essays. Since 2013, she has worked to broaden Asawa’s legacy. She lives in San Francisco with her husband Peter.
Paul Lanier is a ceramic artist and sculptor who lives and works in San Francisco. He studied with Marguerite Wildenhain at Pond Farm, and then at both Luther and Hunter Colleges and UC Santa Cruz. He has worked with designers and architects on interior and exterior pieces. Paul has 35 years of experience with private and public commissions and assisted his mother Ruth Asawa on many of her large scale public art projects. He is a passionate advocate of excellence in arts education and of public education.
Marilyn Chase Author, journalist and teacher Marilyn Chase is at work on a biography: Everything She Touched: The Life of Ruth Asawa, slated for publication in Spring 2020 by Chronicle Books. A former staff writer and columnist for the Wall Street Journal, Chase previously taught narrative writing at Stanford University, and now serves as a Continuing Lecturer in the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. Her first book, The Barbary Plague: The Black Death in Victorian San Francisco, was published by Random House in 2003. A graduate of Stanford with honors in English literature, she received a Master’s Degree in Journalism from Berkeley. She lives with her family in San Francisco.
Akira Boch is an award-winning filmmaker and Director of the Watase Media Arts Center at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles. He has an MFA in directing from the UCLA School of Film, Television, and Digital Media, and has made dozens of documentaries, music videos, and short films. His independent feature, The Crumbles, toured nationally at theaters, festivals, and universities.
Juan Devis is the Chief Creative Officer of KCET and PBS SoCal in Southern California and Link TV. He is responsible for the oversight of all production and editorial output from long-form episodes to short-form digital series. His role in developing strategic partnerships with funders, organizations and independent production houses ensures a new slate of content for both KCET and PBS SoCal in Southern California and Link TV nationwide. Devis develops creative strategies that define KCET, Link and PBS Socal’s editorial and artistic vision.
Jacqueline Reyno is a Producer for KCET/PBS SoCal/LinkTV. Reyno produces the arts and culture program Artbound, an award-winning a series about the cultural stories of our time told through the lives, works and creative processes of innovators. Additionally, Reyno produces The Migrant Kitchen, an Emmy®-winning series that explores California’s booming food scene through the eyes of a new generation of chefs whose cuisine is inspired by the immigrant experience; along with the series, Broken Bread, hosted by chef Roy Choi as he explores the broken systems in our communities and learns from the individuals and organizations who use food as a platform for activism and a catalyst for change.

California Studio Craft
2019-06-15 - 2020-02-23 | SFO Museum, San Francisco Airport, San Francisco, CA, 94128, United States
SFO Terminal 2
Departures – Level 2 – Post-Security
Featuring works from the Forrest L. Merrill collection
Studio craft combines the characteristics of traditional, handmade craft with the refined qualities of fine art. Made by professional artist-craftspeople who work in a variety of media, studio craft includes both utilitarian items and more experimental pieces that focus on aesthetics over function. For many, studio craft is an imaginative and personal expression that encourages creativity through the exploration of time-tested materials and techniques. The finest objects evoke emotion and exhibit the process of making along with evidence of the artist’s hand.
During the mid-20th century, studio craft began to thrive in California. Working with materials including clay, fiber, wood, metal, and glass, studio craft makers pioneered new directions in their respective media. With the support of college programming, exhibitions, and a burgeoning consumer market, makers utilized an artistic focus that bound craft more closely to the fine arts. A revolutionary studio craft movement emerged, and as the scene expanded around Southern California and the San Francisco Bay Area, other cities throughout the nation took notice.
California craft makers produced an array of modern, regionally unique items. Glen Lukens (1887–1967), who founded the ceramics department at the University of Southern California in 1933, was known for the “California Color” range of glazes that he formulated from minerals found in the state’s desert regions. Laura Andreson (1902–99), a Los Angeles-based potter who experimented with crystalline glazes, assembled a ceramics program for the University of California, Los Angeles, a short time later. Some of the state’s pioneering craft makers, such as the husband-and-wife team of Otto (1908–2007) and Gertrude (1908–71) Natzler, immigrated from Europe and brought with them centuries of European methods for working with clay.
Numerous makers have left their own indelible marks on California studio craft. Educator and sculptor Peter Voulkos (1924–2002) ushered ceramics towards a more expressive aesthetic. Marvin Lipofsky (1938–2016) and Robert Fritz (1920–86) founded the first studio glass programs in the state’s college system. June Schwarcz (1918–2015) took enamels to new heights with her experimental, electroformed vessels. Bob Stocksdale (1913–2003) set the bar for woodturners with his simple-yet-elegant forms. Kay Sekimachi (b. 1926) continues her innovative work as a fiber artist with masterful on- and off-loom textiles. These are a few of the many foundational makers who have created and redefined California studio craft over the past six decades.
This exhibition was made possible through a generous loan from Forrest L. Merrill. Thank you to Forrest L. Merrill for his support of this project, and to the Marvin Lipofsky Estate and Modern i Shop for their additional loans.
Photo © Laurence Cuneo

Artistic License: Six Takes on the Guggenheim Collection
2019-05-24 10:00 - 2020-01-12 17:30 | Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1071 5th Ave, New York, NY, United States
The first-ever artist-curated exhibition mounted at the Guggenheim celebrates the museum’s extensive collection of modern and contemporary art. Curated by Cai Guo-Qiang, Paul Chan, Jenny Holzer, Julie Mehretu, Richard Prince, and Carrie Mae Weems — artists who each have had influential solo shows at the museum — Artistic License brings together both well-known and rarely seen works from the turn of the century to 1980.
Each artist was invited to make selections to shape a discrete presentation, one on each of the six levels of the rotunda. With the museum’s curators and conservators, they searched through the collection in storage, encountering renowned masterpieces while also finding singular contributions by less-prominent figures. The resulting exhibition presents nearly 300 paintings, sculptures, works on paper, and installations, some never before shown, that engage with the cultural discourses of their time—from the utopian aspirations of early modernism to the formal explorations of mid-century abstraction and the sociopolitical debates of the 1960s and ’70s. On view during the 60th anniversary of the Guggenheim’s iconic Frank Lloyd Wright–designed building, Artistic License honors the museum’s artist-centric ethos and commitment to art as a force for upending expectations and expanding perspectives.
Artistic License is organized with the artists by Nancy Spector, Artistic Director and Jennifer and David Stockman Chief Curator; supported by Ylinka Barotto, Assistant Curator; with Tracey Bashkoff, Director of Collections and Senior Curator; and Joan Young, Director, Curatorial Affairs.
The museum is open from 10-8 on Saturdays. Every Saturday, from 5–8 pm, you can pay what you wish for admission (cash only). Suggested admission is $10 and the last ticket is issued at 7:30 pm.
Get New York CityPASS, New York Explorer Pass, and New York pass for discounted admission to the Guggenheim and other New York attractions. Learn more about these and other special offers, including a UnionPay discount, on the Discounts page.

Sam Talks — Revealing Ruth Asawa, Artist And Advocate
2019-05-08 18:15 - 20:15 | Seattle Art Museum, 1300 1st Ave, Seattle, WA, 98101, United States
A conversation with
Daniell Cornell, independent arts professional, cultural historian, curator, and educator
Mayumi Tsutakawa, writer and curator
Join us for a conversation on the remarkable life and work of Ruth Asawa (1926-2013), with curator Daniell Cornell and writer/curator Mayumi Tsutakawa. Known especially for her hanging looped wire sculptures, Asawa also created other forms of sculpture, prints, paintings, and installation art. Interest and appreciation for her work continues to grow, along with new assessments of her importance within modern art movements.
After living through the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II along with her family in California and at the Rohwer Arkansas camp, Asawa studied with Josef Albers and other notables at Black Mountain College. She then lived in the San Francisco area, where she created extraordinary sculpture exploring line, space, and light; received public art commissions; and was a strong advocate for arts education in public schools.
About the Presenters
Daniell Cornell is an independent arts professional, cultural historian, curator, and educator. While serving as Director of Contemporary Art Projects for the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (2000-2008), he worked with Ruth Asawa over several years in organizing and writing for the 2006 major retrospective exhibition and catalogue The Sculpture of Ruth Asawa: Contours in the Air.
Mayumi Tsutakawa is a writer and curator who has focused on Asian/Pacific American history and arts.
This talk takes place in the Plestcheeff Auditorium at the Seattle Art Museum in downtown Seattle. South Hall doors open at 6:30 PM.
Seating is first-come, first-served. Please arrive to your seat 10 minutes before the program starts, or your seat may be released.
Individual tickets available at the door: $10, SAM members $5; free at the door for students with ID.

The Medium Is the Message: Art since 1950
2019-02-22 08:00 - 2020-05-01 17:00 | Cantor Arts Center, 328 Lomita Drive at Museum Way, Stanford, CA, 94305, United States
It is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action.
—Marshall McLuhan, The Medium Is the Message

Using works created since 1950, this exhibition explores the relationship between subject, content, and the materials that informed each object’s production.
The exhibition is divided into three broad categories that explore the notion of “medium” in its various contexts: a means of communication, the materials from which an art object is created, and a mediating apparatus between objects and subjects.
“In the Abstract,” explores how paint, metal, and fabric can be used as means of abstract communication. “The Sum of Its Parts” explores how artists have used nontraditional art materials for critical and expressive inquiry. Lastly, “The Faces We Present” reconsiders the limits of figural representation, investigating how portraiture can serve as a mediating apparatus between the past and the present.
Viewed collectively, these works suggest that an exploration of medium is one way of challenging dominant discourses around art, culture, and history.
Read the Stanford Arts story about the exhibition >
Photo: Edward Kienholz and Nancy Reddin Kienholz (Edward Kienholz: U.S.A., 1927–1994; Nancy Kienholz: U.S.A., b. 1943), The Billionaire Deluxe, 1977. Metal, Fresnel lens system, light bulb, and solid-state electronic second counter. Gift of the Marmor Foundation (Drs. Michael and Jane Marmor) from the collection of Drs. Judd and Katherine Marmor, 2007.57

The Bauhaus and Harvard
2019-02-08 10:00 - 2019-07-28 17:00 | Harvard Art Museums, 32 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA, 02138, United States
The museum is free to students with valid id and youth under 18.
The Bauhaus and Harvard — mounted in conjunction with the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany — presents nearly 200 works by 74 artists, drawn almost entirely from the Busch-Reisinger Museum’s extensive Bauhaus collection. Founded in 1919 and closed just 14 years later, the Bauhaus was the 20th century’s most influential school of art, architecture, and design. Harvard University played host to the first Bauhaus exhibition in the United States in 1930, and went on to become an unofficial center for the Bauhaus in America when founding director Walter Gropius joined Harvard’s department of architecture in 1937. Today the Busch-Reisinger Museum houses the largest Bauhaus collection outside Germany, initiated and assembled through the efforts of Gropius and many former teachers and students who emigrated from Nazi Germany, including Anni and Josef Albers, Herbert Bayer, Lyonel Feininger, and László Moholy-Nagy.
The exhibition features rarely seen student exercises, iconic design objects, photography, textiles, typography, paintings, and archival materials. It explores the school’s pioneering approach to art education, the ways its workshops sought to revolutionize the experience of everyday life, the widespread influence of Bauhaus instruction in America, and Harvard’s own Graduate Center (1950), the first modernist building complex on campus, designed by Gropius’s firm The Architects Collaborative. A complementary exhibition installed in an adjacent gallery — Hans Arp’s Constellations II — features one of the site-specific works commissioned for the Graduate Center.
A comprehensive digital resource launched in 2016 provides access to the museums’ more than 32,000 Bauhaus-related objects and shares scholarship on the school’s extensive ties to Harvard and the Greater Boston area. A publication inspired by The Bauhaus and Harvard and its related programming is due out in Fall 2020.
Organized by the Harvard Art Museums. Curated by Laura Muir, Research Curator in the Division of Academic and Public Programs, Harvard Art Museums.
Support for this project is provided by endowed funds, including the Daimler Curatorship of the Busch-Reisinger Museum Fund, the Charles L. Kuhn Endowment Fund, and the Care of the Busch-Reisinger Museum Collection Fund. The publication is supported by the Harvard Art Museums Mellon Publication Funds, including the Carola B. Terwilliger Fund. In addition, exhibition related programming is made possible by the M. Victor Leventritt Fund, which was established through the generosity of the wife, children, and friends of the late M. Victor Leventritt, Harvard Class of 1935. Modern and contemporary art programs at the Harvard Art Museums are made possible in part by generous support from the Emily Rauh Pulitzer and Joseph Pulitzer, Jr., Fund for Modern and Contemporary Art.
Explore more about the Bauhaus centenary: bauhaus100.com
Share your experience: #Bauhaus100 #HarvardArtMuseums
Photo: Harvard Art Museums/Busch-Reisinger Museum

Anni Albers at the Tate Modern
2018-10-11 10:00 - 2019-01-27 20:00 | Tate Modern, Bankside, London, SE1 9TG, United Kingdom
A long overdue recognition of Albers’s pivotal contribution to modern art and design, this is the first major exhibition of her work in the UK.
As a female student at the radical Bauhaus art school, Albers was discouraged from taking up certain classes. She enrolled in the weaving workshop and made textiles her key form of expression. She inspired and was inspired by her artist contemporaries, among them her teacher, Paul Klee, and her husband, Josef Albers.
This beautiful exhibition illuminates the artist’s creative process and her engagement with art, architecture and design. You can discover why Albers has been a profound influence on artists around the world via more than 350 objects from exquisite small-scale ‘pictorial weavings’ to large wall-hangings and the textiles she designed for mass production, as well as her later prints and drawings.
At the heart of the exhibition is an exploration of Albers’s seminal publication On Weaving 1965 and the wide source material she gathered together to create the book.
Photo: Anni Albers Card Weaving at Black Mountain College Black Mountain College Photograph Collection, State Archives of North Carolina, Western Regional Archives, Asheville, N.C.

Frieze Masters London
2018-10-04 11:00 - 2018-10-07 18:00 | Regent’s Park, Gloucester Green, Regent's Park, London, United Kingdom
Frieze Masters features more than 130 leading modern and historical galleries from around the world, showcasing art from the ancient era and Old Masters to the late 20th century. David Zwirner is participating in Frieze Masters, with a selection of works by Anni Albers, Josef Albers, Ruth Asawa, Piero Dorazio, Yayoi Kusama, René Magritte, Giorgio Morandi, Bruce Nauman, Robert Rauschenberg, Dieter Roth, Jan Schoonhoven, Mira Schendel, Michelle Stuart, Cy Twombly, and Franz West.
Booth F11
Tickets are limited and often sell out >

Between Form and Content: Perspectives on Jacob Lawrence and Black Mountain College
2018-09-28 11:00 - 2019-01-01 17:00
Curated by Julie Levin Caro and Jeff Arnal
One of the most widely regarded American artists of the 20th century, Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000) is known for his paintings, drawings, and prints that hover between abstraction and socially inspired narrative realism, chronicling African-American history and experience during his lifetime. Between Form and Content will be the very first exhibition to focus on Lawrence’s experiences during the summer of 1946, when Josef Albers invited Lawrence to teach painting at Black Mountain College. In addition to Lawrence’s paintings, the exhibition will feature artworks by Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence, Josef and Anni Albers, Leo Amino, Jean Varda, Ruth Asawa, Ray Johnson, and Beaumont and Nancy Newhall. It will also examine Lawrence’s paintings, pedagogy, and legacy in a contemporary context, through the lens of four multimedia artists: Animator/filmmaker Martha Colburn, composer/performer, Tyondai Braxton, installation artist Grace Villamil and writer and interdisciplinary artist, Jace Clayton (DJ Rupture).
(The center is closed Tuesdays and Sundays. This is the first show in their new location.)

Dance Performance by Emma Lanier
2018-09-15 14:15 - 15:00 | Pulitzer Arts Foundation, 3716 Washington Boulevard, St. Louis, MO, 63108, United States
Emma Lanier, dancer, choreographer, and granddaughter of Ruth Asawa, performs an original dance solo alongside the artist’s sculptures in Life’s Work. Though Asawa identified as a visual artist, she studied dance with Merce Cunningham in the summer of 1948 during her formative years at Black Mountain College. Through her performance, Lanier reflects on her grandmother’s interests in space and form, filtered through her personal experience.
Photo: Anagama, 2017
Choreographed and performed by Emma Lanier at David Zwirner Gallery, 2017
Photograph by Anastasiia Sapon

Ruth Asawa: Life's Work at the Pulitzer
2018-09-14 10:00 - 2019-02-16 17:00 | Pulitzer Arts Foundation, 3716 Washington Boulevard, St. Louis, MO, 63108, United States
The Pulitzer presents the first major museum exhibition of the work of Ruth Asawa (1926–2013) since 2006, and the first ever outside the West Coast, where the artist lived and worked for six decades. This landmark career-spanning show brings together some eighty works, comprising nearly sixty sculptures from the full trajectory of her career—including looped wire, tied wire, electroplated, and cast works—as well as twenty drawings and collages, some of which date back to her years at Black Mountain College, where she studied with Josef Albers, who inspired her interest in materials as generators of form. Together, the works in the exhibition will provide new insight into Asawa’s innovative contributions to the field of modern and contemporary sculpture.
Opening Reception is on Friday, September 14 from 6-9
Ruth Asawa: Life’s Work is curated by Tamara H. Schenkenberg, Curator at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation.
Free Entry & Free Parking
Admission to the Pulitzer is free, and visitors can park for free in the lot adjacent to the museum.
Read the Washington Post review, “Is this the most beautiful show of the year” >
Open Hours
Wednesday, 10am–5pm
Thursday, 10am–5pm
Friday, 10am–8pm
Saturday, 10am–5pm
The Pulitzer will be closed Independence Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Day.
Photo: Ruth Asawa
Untitled (S.453, Hanging Three-Lobed, Three-Layered Continuous Form within a Form), c. 1957–59
Iron Wire
41 1/4 x 16 1/2 x 16 1/2 inches (104.8 x 41.9 x 41.9 cm)
Private Collection
Courtesy David Zwirner Gallery
© The Estate of Ruth Asawa, Courtesy The Estate of Ruth Asawa and David Zwirner, New York/London/Hong Kong
Photograph by Dan Bradica

Anni Albers in Dusseldorf
2018-06-09 11:00 - 2018-09-09 18:00 | K20 Grabbeplatz, Grabbeplatz 5, Düsseldorf, 40213, Germany
Anni Albers (1899 – 1994) was a multifaceted artist who established weaving as an art form and united this ancient cultural technology with modern artistic practices. This retrospective exhibition offers deep insight into the achievement of the artist, craftswoman, designer, author, and teacher Anni Albers, from her beginnings at the innovative Bauhaus in Weimar and Dessau, to her time at the legendary Black Mountain College, and up until the 1980s.
While her woven images – characterized by textile structures, subtle coloration, and an abstract formal language – are intended for visual contemplation, her room dividers, carpets, and curtain material are meant to be used. Along with her numerous textile patterns and designs, they illustrate Albers’ intensive preoccupation with intricate woven structures and innovative fibers. A selection of works commissioned by architects testifies to her sustained interest in a dialogue between architecture and textile art. In addition, diverse materials, along with texts by Albers the author, illustrate the history and the possibilities of weaving while visualizing – with reference to pre-Columbian textiles from the collection of Josef and Anni Albers – her idea of woven thread as constituting a kind of universal language.
This encounter with the remarkable diversity of her achievement will inspire a renewed appreciation for Anni Albers’ singular contribution to modernism and her sustained influence on both art and design.
The exhibition is being organized by the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, and the Tate Modern, London.
Catalog
Anni Albers
The exhibition is accompanied by an extensive and richly illustrated catalog with contributions by the editors and curators Ann Coxon, Briony Fer and Maria Müller-Schareck as well as texts of Brenda Danilowitz, Magdalena Droste, Nicholas Fox Weber, Maria Minera, Priyesh Mistry, Jennifer Reynolds-Kaye and T’ai Smith.
Tate Publishing / Hirmer publishing company of Munich, 192 pages, 36,00 Euro
Photo: Anni Albers Study for Unexecuted Wallhanging 1926 The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation © Estate of Anni Albers; ARS, NY & DACS, London 2018

FOG Design+Art Fair
2018-01-11 11:00 - 2018-01-14 17:00 | Fort Mason Center, Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture, Landmark Building C, 2 Marina Blvd, San Francisco, CA, 94123, United States
The fifth annual edition of the FOG Design+Art Fair will take place January 11–14, 2018 at the Fort Mason Center in San Francisco. The Preview Gala benefiting the newly transformed and widely heralded San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) will be held on Wednesday, January 10, 2018. Celebrating today’s most significant creatives and leading contributors to the worlds of design and visual arts, the fair assembles 45 leading international galleries; prominent 20th-century and contemporary design dealers; a weekend of exciting programs; and 21POP, a special installation created by Stanlee Gatti.
FOG has become a focal point for the design and arts communities on the West Coast and further afield. The fair is synonymous with a uniquely pioneering spirit due to its bold hybrid approach and intimate presentation of art and design, dynamic programming on-site and its community-led mission to champion art and design in its historic Fort Mason setting. Building on FOG’s longstanding commitment to cultural institutions, the fair’s Preview Gala is honored to continue its crucial support of SFMOMA’s exhibitions and education programs. FOG represents a key moment in which the local and global community congregate to engage in critical dialogue, artistic exchanges and a shared passion for creative pursuits.

Active Archive | Martha McDonald Process + Performance
2017-11-15 11:00 - 17:00 | Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, 120 College Street, Ashville, NC, 28801, United States
56 + 69 BROADWAY
Opening Reception: Friday, September 29, 5-7pm – Performance by Martha McDonald at 5:30 pm FREE
ACTIVE ARCHIVE is a stream of programs that pairs the museum’s extensive collection with contemporary artists, curators, and cultural thinkers. It launches with an exhibition featuring the museum’s permanent collection curated by Philadelphia-based interdisciplinary artist Martha McDonald.
McDonald brings the ideas of Black Mountain College alive through an exhibition of artwork and ephemera from BMCM+AC’s collection and an installation and live performance drawing on the rich history of experimental performance at BMC. The exhibition, across both galleries, focuses on the importance of color, process, and material exploration at BMC. It includes student color studies from Josef Albers’ influential Werklehre courses; paintings, sculptures, textiles, and ceramics by BMC faculty and students reflecting this legacy of material and color study; and a selection of idiosyncratic, hand-printed programs highlighting the history of collaborative performance at BMC.
McDonald’s performance will activate her installation of objects and costumes inspired by Xanti Schawinsky’s 1936-37 experimental theater piece, Spectodrama, which formed the basis of his Stage Studies course at BMC. McDonald’s performance features music inspired by John Evarts’ collaborations with Schawinsky at BMC from 1936-38.
Support for this project has been generously provided by the following: Henry Luce Foundation, North Carolina Arts Council, a division of the Department of Cultural Resources with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Windgate Charitable Foundation. Special thanks to Bill Adair and Connie Bostic.
Photo: Xanti Schawinsky, Untitled, n.d., painting and pencil on print, 26 x 17.625 inches. Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center Collection. Gift of Brian E. Butler.
Related Events:

September 29, 5:30PM {69 Broadway} Performance: Music for Modernist Shapes: Reimagining Spectodrama
September 29, 7PM Opening Reception FREE
September 29 + 30, 8PM {Diana Wortham Theatre} Black Mountain Songs
September 29 – October 1 {UNC Asheville} Conference: ReVIEWING Black Mountain College 9
October 11, 7PM {56 Broadway} Listening Session: Experiments in Notation
October 27 + 28 {22 London Road} Performance: Supper, People on the Move
November 3, 7PM {56 Broadway} Poetry Reading: Mad Hat Poetry Prose & Anything Goes
November 29, 7PM {56 Broadway} Film Screening: BAUHAUS: The Face of the Twentieth Century
November 17+18, 7PM {69 Broadway} Performance: Music for Modernist Shapes: Reimagining Spectodrama
December 7, 7PM {69 Broadway} Performance: Aspects of Butoh
December 9, 8pm {69 Broadway} Poetry Reading: Richard Chess, Tommy Hays, David Hopes,Beth Keefauver, and Eric Steineger

Artists’ Eyes: Art of Incarceration (Presidio)
2017-11-11 12:00 - 2018-05-20 17:00 | MIS Historic Learning Center, 640 Old Mason Street, Crissy Field, Presidio of San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, 94129, United States
In commemoration of the 75th Anniversary of Executive Order 9066, the National Japanese American Historical Society presents Artists’ Eyes, Art of Incarceration. During World War II, Executive Order 9066 led to the registration, exclusion, forced removal and mass incarceration of 120,000 Japanese Americans from the West Coast. Two multigenerational art exhibits reveal a successive unearthing of evocative expressions through three generations. Works by Japanese American and other multicultural artists expose the profound and eventual reclamation of history and identity. Works and artist talks make connections to the current climate today.
The exhibits, hosted at NJAHS’s two sites at the Presidio and Japantown, are curated by
Betty Nobue Kano and Judy Shintani. (listing is for the MIS Historic Learning Center location in the Presidio).
It’s open WEEKENDS only from 12-5, by appt W-F
Title photos: Artwork L to R: Hideo Kobashigawa, Ellen Bepp, Roger Shimomura, Shari Arai DeBoer.
Photo at left: Asawa’s looped wire sculpture on exhibit at this location.

Josef and Anni and Ruth and Ray
2017-09-20 10:00 - 2017-10-21 18:00
David Zwirner is pleased to present Josef and Anni and Ruth and Ray as the inaugural exhibition at the gallery’s 34 East 69th Street location. Featuring work by Josef Albers, Anni Albers, Ruth Asawa, and Ray Johnson—all of whom were at Black Mountain College in North Carolina in the late 1940s—this exhibition will explore both the aesthetic and personal dialogue between these artists during their Black Mountain years and beyond; and will include a number of works exchanged amongst the group, in addition to a selection of key compositions influenced by their time there.
Josef and Anni Albers arrived at Black Mountain College in 1933, both having studied and subsequently taught at the Bauhaus for nearly a decade. It was through the Alberses that the pedagogy of the famed German art school, which espoused ideals of radical experimentation and an open interchange of ideas, was imported and adapted in their new setting. As Asawa recalls, Josef Albers would open his Basic Design course by saying, “Open your eyes and see. My aim is to make you see more than you want to. I am here to destroy all your prejudices. If you already have a style don’t bring it with you. It will only be in the way”—in essence paraphrasing the aesthetic philosophy that came to define Black Mountain College as a progressive and avant-garde institution in those years. Johnson arrived as student in 1945, and Asawa subsequently in 1946—both quickly availing themselves of the Alberses’s guidance, which was particularly unexpected in the case of Johnson, whose nontraditional approach contrasted with the older artists’ formal rigor.

David Zwirner Gallery
2017-09-13 10:00 - 2017-10-21 18:00
David Zwirner is pleased to announce the gallery’s first exhibition dedicated to the work of Ruth Asawa since having announced the representation of the artist’s estate earlier this year, which will take place at the 537 West 20th Street location. The exhibition will bring together a selection of key sculptures, paintings, and works on paper spanning Asawa’s influential practice, as well as rare archival materials, including a group of vintage photographs of the artist and her work by Imogen Cunningham.
Photo by Imogen Cunningham: Asawa in her studio in 1957.
© 2017 Imogen Cunningham Trust

Abstract Expressionism: Looking East from the Far West
2017-09-07 08:00 - 2018-01-21 17:00
Abstract Expressionism: Looking East from the Far West considers mid-20th-century abstraction through its Asian-American practitioners, with a special focus on Hawai‘i artists. It is the first museum exhibition to bring artists of the New York School together with Asian-American artists who studied and worked in New York in the 1940s and 1950s, examining the influence of Asian intellectual and artistic traditions on artists long revered as uniquely American.
The exhibition presents major works by American masters such as Philip Guston, Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko, alongside those by Asian-American artists such as Ruth Asawa, Saburo Hasegawa, Isamu Noguchi, and Hawai‘i art icons like Satoru Abe, Isami Doi, Tadashi Sato, and Tetsuo Ochikubo, among others. With more than 45 paintings, drawings, and sculptures, the exhibition examines the ways in which Eastern traditions from Chinese and Japanese calligraphy to Zen Buddhism helped advance Abstract Expressionism’s aesthetic agenda—its understated lyricism, its compositional balance, its subtle awareness of place—regardless of the artist.

Found in Translation: Design in California and Mexico, 1915–1985
2017-08-17 11:00 - 2018-04-01 17:00
Found in Translation: Design in California and Mexico, 1915–1985 is a groundbreaking exhibition and accompanying book about design dialogues between California and Mexico. Its four main themes—Spanish Colonial Inspiration, Pre-Columbian Revivals, Folk Art and Craft Traditions, and Modernism—explore how modern and anti-modern design movements defined both locales throughout the twentieth century. Half of the show’s more than 300 objects represent architecture, conveyed through drawings, photographs, films, and models to illuminate the unique sense of place that characterized California’s and Mexico’s buildings. The other major focus is design: furniture, ceramics, metalwork, graphic design, and murals. Placing prominent figures such as Richard Neutra, Luis Barragán, Charles and Ray Eames, and Clara Porset in a new context while also highlighting contributions of less familiar practitioners, this exhibition is the first to examine how interconnections between California and Mexico shaped the material culture of each place, influencing and enhancing how they presented themselves to the wider world.
Regular Hours
Monday, Tuesday, Thursday: 11 am–5 pm
Friday: 11 am–8 pm
Saturday, Sunday: 10 am–7 pm
Closed Wednesdays, Thanksgiving Day, and Christmas Day.
Tickets are available anytime online, during regular museum hours at a LACMA Ticket Office, or by calling 323 857-6010.
General Admission

$15 | Adults
$10 | Seniors (65+) & Students with valid ID
Free | Children (17 and under)
Free | Members

L.A. County residents receive free general admission after 3 pm every weekday LACMA is open!
Active-duty military personnel including National Guard and Reserve and their families receive free admission.*

Where We Are: Selections from the Whitney's Collection 1900-1960
2017-04-28 10:30 - 2020-04-28 18:00 | Whitney Museum of American Art, 99 Gansevoort Street, New York, NY, 10014, United States
Focusing on works made from 1900 to 1960, Where We Are traces how artists have approached the relationships, institutions, and activities that shape our lives. Drawn entirely from the Whitney’s holdings, the exhibition is organized around five themes: family and community, work, home, the spiritual, and the nation. During the six decades covered here, the United States experienced war and peace, economic collapse and recovery, and social discord and progress. American artists responded in complex and diverse ways, and a central aim of the exhibition is to honor each artist’s efforts to create her or his own vision of American life. The artists and their works suggest that our sense of self is composed of our responsibilities, places, and beliefs.
Where We Are, as well as each of its sections, is titled after a phrase in W. H. Auden’s poem “September 1, 1939.” Auden, who was raised in England, wrote the poem in New York shortly after his immigration to the United States and at the very outset of World War II. The title of the poem marks the date Germany invaded Poland. While its subject is the beginning of the war, Auden’s true theme is how the shadow of a global emergency reaches into the far corners of everyday life. Although mournful, the poem concludes by pointing to the individual’s capacity to “show an affirming flame.” Where We Are shares Auden’s guarded optimism, gathering a constellation of artists whose light might lead us forward.
Where We Are is organized by David Breslin, DeMartini Family Curator and Director of the Collection, with Jennie Goldstein, assistant curator, and Margaret Kross, curatorial assistant.
Photo: Charles Demuth (1883‑1935), Buildings, Lancaster, 1930. Oil and graphite pencil on composition board, 24 1/8 × 20 1/8in. (61.3 × 51.1 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift of an anonymous donor 58.63
